Hello - welcome to OR. I’m your host, Doug Kulchar (@dkulchar)
The overriding point I have to make in this newsletter is threefold. First, that rhetoric is probabilistic. Second, and following from the first, artificial intelligence is a rhetorical project. Third, and most speculatively, by getting clear on what the first two mean, we can understand rhetoricity - that is, rhetoric as an agent-neutral, multiply realizable inferential process - as a fundamental property of complex systems, living and artificial. That is, rhetoricity is something near to not quite the ‘meaning’ of life or the universe, but rather to its operation.
This is heady stuff. Eventually, some version of this will become my dissertation. But dissertations are strange, often arcane documents. Rhetoric belongs to the people. So there will be plenty of time for us to get lost in the weeds, but as an opening salvo, I want to setup the core concepts we’ll be working with - the rest will come later. So: let’s go.
How to Succeed in Politics Without Really Knowing Anything
Rhetoric - in the everyday sense - is the art of eloquence, for good or for ill. References to the ‘empty’ or ‘mere’ rhetoric of politicians are common, as is a general sort of idea of great men making great speeches. Rhetoric describes, as it were, how to talk more gooder.
But it’s never been only this. Although today, most people are likely to use the word in a strictly pejorative sense, historically, rhetoric has had a close relationship with law, philosophy, grammar, logic, literature, war, and revolution. The works of Plato and Aristotle which concern rhetoric are littered with references to the political controversies of classical Athens and quotations from Homer.
But it’s not just about massaging the truth or finding ways to dress up some idea for this or that purpose; rhetoric seems to play some sort of basic, foundational role in the making of meaning. Aristotle, at the beginning of his Rhetoric, defines it as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”1 Two aspects should jump out at us. First, rhetoric isn’t the faculty of persuasion itself, but something auxiliary to it. Second, whatever this something is, it’s context-dependent but never absent. Whatever situation a person finds themselves confronted with, they’ll find some way to ‘do’ rhetoric. It doesn’t necessarily need to sound good, memorable, or true (even if it could be any or all of these) - what matters is that it gets the job done.
Depending on how charitable you’re feeling, this might be a feature or a bug. Gorgias, one of Plato’s earliest dialogues, plumbs this ambiguity. In the dialogue, Socrates walks in on Gorgias, one of the pre-eminent sophists2, and raises the question of what, exactly, he gets paid so well to teach. The question, as Socrates asks it, is somewhat like asking a student what their degree is in, in the sense that “if he [Gorgias] were a maker of shoes, he’d answer that he’s a cobbler.”3 But Gorgias claims to be capable of providing answers to any question put to him, on any subject whatsoever - his craft is oratory, referred to by Polus (another party to the dialogue) as “the most admirable of the crafts.”4 Yet it’s here that the ambiguity first emerges. Oratory is a craft concerned with speeches, but so too is every other craft: medicine confers wisdom about healing the sick, and by extension, speeches about it. Socrates, in this way, drives a wedge between two distinct facets of a craft, which - roughly - we might gloss as style and substance. Knowledge of the substance of a given subject, like mathematics, doesn’t necessarily imply the ability to speak about that subject with style. The converse, also, seems to be true: one can speak persuasively and with style, but without substance5. There are, then, two types of persuasion: “one providing conviction without knowledge, the other providing knowledge.”6 Oratory produces the former. Suppose we have a sick man, who refuses to take medicine prescribed by a doctor. Gorgias could, by means of oratory, convince him to do so. Whether Gorgias knows anything about medicine here is irrelevant: indeed, he goes so far as to claim that “there isn’t anything that the orator couldn’t speak more persuasively about to a gathering than could any craftsman whatsoever.”7 As Gorgias puts it, “it encompasses and subordinates to itself just about everything that can be accomplished.”8 Aristotle, later on, echoes this, noting that “Rhetoric does not deal with any one definite class of subjects, but, like Dialectic, [is of general application].”9 So it goes for provisionality-as-feature.
The flipside of this, however, is that a craft of general application may not do anything that knowledge of a particular craft can’t. Oratory, as Socrates suggests, can make a person “persuasive in a gathering about all subjects, not by teaching but by persuading,” to a degree which might even succeed the practicioner of a given subject10. Here, however, Gorgias hedges, emphasizing that it’s specifically in the context of a gathering that the orator can do this. As if sensing blood in the water, Socrates presses the point, asking “doesn’t ‘in a gathering’ just mean ‘among those who don’t have knowledge?’”11 Gorgias (somewhat testily) concedes Socrates’ point; oratory doesn’t need knowledge of a subject, and - moreover - it can only work on people who, likewise, lack knowledge of the subject. Twisting the knife, Socrates then suggests that oratory is, perhaps, better characterized as a knack12: “a practice that’s not craftlike, but one that a mind given to making hunches takes to, a mind that’s bold and naturally clever at dealing with people…flattery, basically.”13 Harsh? Possibly, but is he actually wrong?
Oratory/rhetoric isn’t beholden to a standard of demonstrable truth, but only to a pragmatic one: what seems ‘good enough’ or plausible. Where no formal deduction of the “all P are Q, X is P, therefore…”-type exists, rhetoric provides a means of making the case for what seems (or should be) most plausible. In making a rhetorical argument, one is always working with incomplete information: if all the facts were in, so to speak, there’d be no need for persuasion. Certainly, for the vast majority of the things we disagree over - clashes of moral or ideological values, aesthetic judgements, and personal conflicts - there’s simply no airtight deduction available. If a person is on trial, and the evidence is ambiguous, who comes to the stand besides character witnesses? If a person’s guilt or innocence cannot be established beyond doubt, surely it’s reasonable enough to say that the defendant is a mostly nice guy?
But, of course, the fundamental problem that Plato’s Socrates is at pains to point out is this: if there’s no explicit rules, and the only real rule for rhetoric is that it has to work, how do you stop informal, everyday reasoning from word-twisting, casuistry, agitation and all the other things that make reasonable people suddenly unreasonable? Sophists like Gorgias teach people to be eloquent and persuasive, but eloquence/persuasion don’t have any obligation to be true, moral, or just. So isn’t it then the case that sophists aren’t teaching people to be wise, but rather simply amplifying their capacities to act without regard for their moral inclinations?
Return of the Rhetorical Repressed
Plato’s answer, as philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze have pointed out, is to subordinate rhetoric to philosophy, a discipline concerned not with the production of truth by imprecise, proximal judgements, but rather the preservation of truth. Plato is content to leave the agora to the rhetoricians and the orators. Why bother trying to build consensus among people who - let’s be real - don’t know a just man from Adam in the first place? But within Plato, one can nevertheless identify a thoroughly rhetorical game.
The “capricious, incoherent”14 method of division, seen in the Sophist and Statesmen dialogues purports to be a method of taxonomizing - “people at a university” divides into “professors” and “students,” “students” divides into “graduates” and “undergraduates,” and so on – yet in practice, it operates entirely contingently. When it is used as an exercise to define ‘fisherman’, there is no clear reason why, “acquisition” divides into “exchange” and “mastery,” nor why “mastery” divides into “combat” and “hunting.”15 Aristotle later criticizes Plato for capriciousness, but Deleuze objects that the purpose of division is not to taxonomize, but rather “dividing a confused species into pure lines of descent, or of selecting a pure line from material which is not.”16 It is intended to evaluate competing claims and authenticate one at the expense of the other, to distinguish “between things and their simulacra within a pseudo-genus.17 That is, given a group of things which are undifferentiated, one simply invents a more or less arbitrary distinction, and then classifies things based on it. It is, in short, a rhetorical claim: one could divide acquisition into exchange and mastery, but one could just as easily divide it differently - who cares? This is the division Plato’s dialogue chooses to make.
Dialogues like Phaedrus and Statesman, meanwhile, replace the free-wheeling division with myth. It seems as if this is an admission that “division lacks probative force”18 and must rely on myth as a stop-gap. Gregory Flaxman observes that the complexity of division “could conceivably extend into endless exercises, and the selection of the real might never come to fruition, were it not for some kind of intervention in the last instance.”19 However, we should not conceive of Plato’s myths only as a philosophical escape hatch. Rather, “the Platonic dialectic maintains the function of myth as the very ground of reason,”20 which is to say: myth justifies the division precisely by appealing to the transcendent, divine authority of the heavens - not the hoi polloi of the orators. Why is the King the king? Because God has chosen him to be the king. Why did God choose him? Well - how could he be King if he weren’t the chosen one?
Only Justice itself can be just; the derivative quality of justice is what is possessed in varying degrees by claimants. Accordingly, a claimant “will be well founded only to the degree that it resembles or imitates the foundation”21 in an internal manner. Justice is always and only itself - as the method of division proceeds, though, claimants increasingly diverge, implying “an infinity of degradation culminating in the one who possesses no more than a simulacrum.”22 The end of the line – the one who displays the least degree of internal resemblance - is a sophist like Gorgias, who “lays claim to everything, and who, in laying such claims to everything, is never grounded but contradicts everything, including himself.”23 On this schema, Platonism turns on the difference between two kinds of claimants: the good claimant, or the “copy,” and the bad one, or the “simulacrum.” To overturn Platonism then is not merely to un-do the drawing of the distinction, but rather to flip the script entirely, “denying the primacy of original over copy.”24
Curiously, given that it provides the clearest statement of this anti-sophist line, the Sophist uses no myth. It does not aim to ascend towards a true claimant, but rather descends to identify the false claimant as such. It is not a matter of “discerning the true sophist from the false claimant, since the true sophist is himself the false claimant.”25 But - and here’s the trick - in the absence of transcendent myth, “Socrates distinguishes himself from the Sophist, but the Sophist does not distinguish himself from Socrates,”26 and both appear as “the ironic imitator who proceeds by brief arguments.”27 If the simulacrum stands on equal footing with the copy, however, the very distinction between the two must be called into question. Consequently, the “the simulacrum must be given its own concept and be defined in affirmative terms”28 – finding truth not in the deficiency of the false claimant, but the truth of the false claimant as such.
Socrates, try as he might to distinguish himself from Gorgias, can only do so by being more Gorgias than Gorgias himself. Rhetoric, it seems, is never more active than when someone claims to be pushing it aside and giving you ‘the truth.’ When Socrates claimed that he only knew that he knew nothing, he was absolutely right and absolutely wrong in equal measure. It’s not that there’s truth out there somewhere and us poor mortals simply haven’t found it yet; it’s that there was only ever here and now, and the only thing to know is that you can simply step off the hamster wheel if you like.
Thanks for joining me. If you enjoyed this, or found it interesting, I hope you’ll consider a subscription.
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.1.i.html
Derived from the ancient Greek σοφία (“sophia,” or wisdom), these were itinerant teachers, typically working with young aristocratic men in anticipation of a life in politics or otherwise public life. Surprisingly, the first philosophers were in it for the money - according to Philostratus, Gorgias (possibly) had a solid gold statue of himself at some point.
Gorgias, 447d. NB: the numbers found in citations of Plato are not page numbers in any particular edition, but rather “Stephanus numbers,” a standardized system of reference for the Platonic corpus. The convention comes from a 3-volume series of Plato’s works dating from the 16th century - a given Stephanus number corresponds to a page number and passage in that edition. A similar convention - Bekker numbers - apply to the Aristotelian corpus.
Ibid. 448c
Certainly, this is the ‘empty’ or ‘mere’ rhetoric referred to above.
Ibid. 454e
Ibid. 456c
Ibid. 456b
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0060%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3D1
Gorgias, 458e
Ibid. 459
The Greek word used is “empeiria,” translated elsewhere in the dialogue - a joke at expense of the pretentious youngster Polus - as “experience.” It’s less a skill and more on the level of being “slick” or “silver-tongued”
Gorgias, 463a-b
Ibid., 59
Sophist, 219d-e
Deleuze 1994, p. 60
Ibid., p. 60
Ibid., 61
Flaxman 2012, p. 148
Ibid., 149
Smith 2012, p. 9
Deleuze 1990, p. 255
Deleuze 1994, p. 63, Protagoras 316c-317c
Ibid., 66
Smith 2012, p. 10
Deleuze 1994, p. 128
Ibid., p. 68
Smith 2012, p. 12